The first rule of swordfight club is: don’t die! The second involves aggression – tricky if you’re used to expressing disapproval through quiet tutting and snippy emails
I recently learned there is a Bake Off equivalent for sword making: Forged in Fire, an epic struggle between (almost exclusively) men and hot metal. Each episode climaxes with the show’s Paul Hollywood figure testing blades on a jelly torso filled with fake blood. If your sword wreaks graphic gelatinous carnage, you get the equivalent of a Hollywood handshake: the accolade “Your blade will keal” (which supposedly means it will “keep everyone alive” but that homophone is not accidental). I find the jelly torso slashing deeply, troublingly satisfying, so I’m trying a sword-fighting class at York School of Defence: I want to keal.
We’re using English longswords. “It’s what you would think of as a classic knightly sword – you hold it in two hands,” says Chris Halpin, the head coach and genial pink-haired martial arts expert. Halpin has been teaching Hema (Historical European martial arts) here for nine years. It’s different from historical reenacting, which, he explains, often uses made-up combat for safety reasons. Hema teaches authentic fighting techniques from historical manuscripts: today’s class is mainly based on the 16th-century Ledall Roll.
